A bullet tore through Staff Sgt. Leonard Lomell's right leg as he stepped into the frigid Atlantic at Omaha Beach.

"I had stepped in a bomb crater, and went to the bottom," Lomell, of Toms River, N.J., said this week.

"As I came up, my guys pulled me [out] and pulled me onto the beach."

It was June 6, 1944 -- D-Day. Lomell and his men were among the first American Soldiers to step out of landing craft and into the murderous German gunfire at Normandy.

Today, 65 years later, the nation pauses to remember the largest water invasion in modern history and a major turning point of World War II.

President Obama will honor the occasion in Normandy today -- amid the graves of 9,387 American military dead -- while VFW posts around the area will hold their own commemorations.

Lomell, 88, is one of the few D-Day survivors still around to honor his comrades. Of the three million Americans who served in WWII, 400,000 died during the war. The aged survivors are now dying at a rate of 2,000 a day.

Bleeding onto the sand, bullets whizzing by, it was a brutal landing for Lomell -- but only the beginning.

A ranger in the 2nd Battalion, trained in the Smoky Mountains, Lomell's mission that dawn was to scale the 100-foot cliff of the Pointe du Hoc, rout the Germans from fortifications there, and destroy the six massive cannons they were guarding.

Lomell and his men fired claw-shaped grappling hooks from the gunwhales of their landing craft, then started climbing.

"[It was] hand-over-hand, no safety lines," Lomell said. "Just you and your two hands, and all your gear."

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